HR 3200 Considered As Software

bfwebster writes "Independent of one's personal opinions regarding the desirability and forms of government-mandated health care reform, there exists the question of how well HR 3200 (or any other legislation) will actually achieve that end and what the unintended (or even intended) consequences may be. There are striking similarities between crafting software and creating legislation, including risks and pitfalls — except that those risks and pitfalls are greater in legislation. I've written an article (first of a three-part series) examining those parallels and how these apply to HR 3200."

Comments

We need buganizer for congress

[something_wicked_thi]

I was thinking just a few days ago that having a buganizer for congress would be an interesting idea. Not very politically likely because you'd never be able to mark a bug "Will not fix - Working as intended" when it was clear that the only reason for a law was because the politicians were bribed enough.

Re:Something needs to be done as today's system is

[polar red]

special comment on health care from olbermann. remember this when you vote next.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbWw23XwO5o

Better Title:

[eln]

HR3200 considered by a software designer with no concept of how legislation works, aka: how to get my rant about HR3200 posted on Slashdot by superficially comparing it to software.

Okay, maybe that title is too long, but at least it's more accurate.

The bulk of the article is concerned with how HR3200 is an unmanageable mess because it's really really long and makes reference to lots of other laws. Well, surprisingly enough, this is how just about every other piece of legislation ever looks. Laws are not written in, and do not exist in, a vacuum. There is a tremendous body of legislation that already exists. New legislation has to modify parts of that existing legislation, while keeping other parts, deleting still other parts, and ignoring completely other parts that aren't relevant to the new law. It's sort of like revision control in software, except instead of having a bunch of diff files in the background and having the new law be the final combined output, the new law is basically a diff file itself, which in turn modifies earlier diff files, which may themselves modify earlier diff files, and so on. The entire revision history is kept in the legislation itself, basically.

HR3200 is very long and complex because it's seeking to overhaul a very large and very complex system with a vast number of laws already written about it. HR3200 has to modify a number of these existing laws in order to do what it aims to do. Frankly, I'd be worried if it came in at much LESS than 1000 pages, given the scope of what it is trying to do and the vast amount of legislation that's already been written regarding health care. The relevant government agencies have plenty of lawyers and other experts whose job it is to make sure the legislation is understood and implemented as written.

Basically, this whole article is an excuse to drive page hits to this guy's blog, and to Slashdot, by trying to come up with some excuse to get huge argument started about health care on a technology site.

Re:Better Title:

[AK Marc]

The bulk of the article is concerned with how HR3200 is an unmanageable mess because it's really really long and makes reference to lots of other laws. Well, surprisingly enough, this is how just about every other piece of legislation ever looks. Laws are not written in, and do not exist in, a vacuum. There is a tremendous body of legislation that already exists. New legislation has to modify parts of that existing legislation, while keeping other parts, deleting still other parts, and ignoring completely other parts that aren't relevant to the new law. It's sort of like revision control in software, except instead of having a bunch of diff files in the background and having the new law be the final combined output, the new law is basically a diff file itself, which in turn modifies earlier diff files, which may themselves modify earlier diff files, and so on. The entire revision history is kept in the legislation itself, basically.

And that itself is a problem. Ever try to actually read a piece of "important" legislation? I have. Once. I gave up. It, like this one, referenced not just numerous other laws, but different books of law, like US Code, IRS Code and such. And to understand the effect of the ones that change those, I had to read large sections of other laws. And you know what? Those sections referenced other sections, other laws, and multiple struck out laws which I then had to look up their replacement to see if that was still in effect. If you pick a particularly bad line of a bill, it could take reading 1000 pages of other laws to understand that one line of a 1000 page piece of legislation. For one, that can lead to unintended consequences. For another, I would expect that no legislator actually reads the bills from start to finish with complete understanding, but instead aides read parts and summarize. Not that it's a particular problem, but if ignorance of the law is no excuse, how can people held to the law be expected to know it if the people that pass it don't even understand it?

HR3200 is very long and complex because it's seeking to overhaul a very large and very complex system with a vast number of laws already written about it. HR3200 has to modify a number of these existing laws in order to do what it aims to do. Frankly, I'd be worried if it came in at much LESS than 1000 pages, given the scope of what it is trying to do and the vast amount of legislation that's already been written regarding health care.

Rather the build on previous laws, with great modifications, it makes for better readability and no reduced functionality to just repeal laws with large modifications and integrate them into the new law. Or, better yet, do it like software. Group three or four laws together. Have one on funding, one on coverage, or other separations that group functions into easier to read and understand segments that are self contained.

Re:Better Title:

[Planesdragon]

Finally, I don'twant an argument on health care reform or HR 3200 at my website

Then you shouldn't have talked about it. Pick an older law, or show multiple examples.

Bringing up Health Care law when we're arguing about it is like bringing up the Civil Rights Act the middle of the civil rights movement. By mentioning it at all, you open the arena for discussion of it.

Oh, and for the record -- law isn't software, it's game design. The closest you'll ever get is networking and interoperability standards. But even those are bad, due to the essentially soft nature of law.

Re:Better Title:

[julesh]

HR3200 considered by a software designer with no concept of how legislation works, aka: how to get my rant about HR3200 posted on Slashdot by superficially comparing it to software.

Okay, maybe that title is too long, but at least it's more accurate.

Agreed. Taking the authors points one by one, yes, I agree it's somewhat long. But it is a major piece of legislation designed to have profound effects. It needs to be long to ensure those effects are adequately managed.

"Much of HR 3200 makes piecemeal modifications to existing legislation, often with little explanation as to intent and consequences."

Well, yes. I question whether the author of this statement has ever read any legislation before, because almost all of it is like this. This is why amended statutes are a useful resource.

"HR 3200 also suffers in places from what a software engineer would call "spaghetti coding". In other words, a given section within HR 3200 [...] will reference several other sections elsewhere in HR 3200, both above and below."

Again, this is practically standard practice, and lawyers and judges are used to dealing with it. It isn't an issue.

"Furthermore, it often requires careful reading going back pages to see whether a reference to a given section is to a section within HR 3200 itself or a section in existing legislation (such as the Internal Revenue Service code)."

Here's the thing: HR3200 is not designed to be read by itself; if enacted, it will be used to make amendments to several other texts, thus producing amended copies of those. When reading the amended texts, it will usually be obvious which act is being referred to.

"HR 3200 also comes across as similar to a "kitchen sink" application, that is, a single piece of legislation that attempts to do far too much. I will finish Part I with the table of contents for HR 3200 to give you a sense of all that it is attempting to do. Note that these divisions, titles, and subtitles could have been broken up into individual legislation."

Not really. A piece of legislation is a compromise. It normally gets accepted because it contains some things that each of several camps wants to have included. Chances are that if you take any of those sections out and try to pass it individually, it won't go through because support for it won't be broad enough. Only taken together is there a chance of it passing into law.

A troll?

[IWannaBeAnAC]

Is this article a troll? Yes, I can see the utility in comparing legislation with software, although I was hoping for something a bit more than superficial analogies. But if the comparison is any use at all, then it will apply to legislation as a whole, so why choose one particular piece of current and controversial legislation to discuss? Surely the fact that it is both current and controversial is only a distraction from the main thesis, of comparing legislation with software? I suspect that the author has an agenda, of trashing the legislation. He also makes a rather fundamental misunderstanding, in his haste to criticize HR 3200. The 'spaghetti coding' is because he isn't looking at the source program itself, what he is looking at is a diff, between the existing regulation and the proposed amended regulation. That is a rather critical difference that invalidates 90% of his analysis.

Re:A troll?

[IWannaBeAnAC]

I have no agenda in HR 3200. I'm not even American, I don't care at all what your healthcare system is. I do find the level of political debate in the US to be rather low, and I find the paranoia about universal healthcare (that works quite well in every other industrialized nation) to be bizarre, but that is for the USA to sort out, not me.

I have no idea whether the US regulations are available online, but the regulations themselves surely are published in some form. Typically, every year the revised regulations are published and available for lawyers, police etc to obtain. The system you imagine, where there is no such document, would be completely impractical, as you acknowledge. That is why it isn't done! Yes, there surely are much better tools that legislators could use to evaluate legislation (context highlighted diffs including the original and revised regulations etc), but the debate over legislation is rarely about details like that. If you want a software analogy, the legislative debates are like a meeting with the upper management about the features of the software. Details of the actual source code won't be discussed, except to ensure that the programmers (drafters of the legislation) are doing their job to correctly implement the requirements.

Article Summary: "HR 3200 too complicated for me"

[AaronBS]

The blogger's complaints seem to boil down to:

1) The legislation is in English
2) The legislation is long
3) The legislation amends current law

Seems to me that *any* important legislation has these "flaws," including laws that have had very positive consequences (i.e., McCain-Feingold). Thankfully, other websites actually parse and interpret the legislation rather than whine about its length.

Chain of command

[joaquin gray]

Isn't H.R. 3200 sort of like DirectX 4?

Re:Astroturfing

[Psyborgue]

Anybody who tagged it that probably didn't RTFA. It's hard to see whether he's taking an opinion in any given political direction. He's just "debugging".

Re:Something needs to be done as today's system is

[jadavis]

[Corporations] will modify the healthcare system to favor themselves through government action.

Agree 100%. The more government is involved in economic decisions, the more corporations will try to insert themselves into the government to influence those economic decisions.

Re:OP missed the biggest one!

[Fnord666]

(Fun fact: did you know that, unless you happen to be disabled, eldery, a child, or a woman, YOU are part of the US militia?)

Being a part of a well regulated militia, I guess I should probably keep and bear arms in case I'm ever needed. Did they happen to mention anything about that?

Sorry...only partially correct.

[meburke]

I'm going to have to dismiss the entire analogy as false due to stretching the premises. Software, in its fundamental sense, is a specific set of instructions designed to make a machine respond precisely, purportedly to accomplish some specified machine-driven task. There is no corresponding requirement for legislation to control the behavior of human action. In fact, according to Blackstone's "Commentaries", law is supposed to define what persons may NOT do. I can see where confusing the two viewpoints might lead us into the quagmire.

The simple laws of mechanics that control our machinery today are subject to very precise, although inexact, mathematical definitions. Theoretically it is possible to prove the precision and error of our computational instructions (although it is not practical to do so in all cases at this time). No human language to date can capture the causes and effects, conditions and nuances with mathematical precision. This shortcoming of human language has been an obstacle in Western philosophical thought since the early Greeks. Therefore, legislation must be drafted in precise terms relating to generalities, but interpreting the law must be done by judging the specific case to see if it fits the criteria described as prohibited behavior.

So we have two very important distinctions: First, to direct computational behavior we must only describe the desired behavior in precise terms. To direct human behavior, we must describe the desired behavior by precisely describing ALL the undesirable behavior, and this is probably impossible. (I'm not going to get into the morality of master-managing each individual's life, nor the tendency of people to resent being forced to behave in ways they don't want to.)

Second, we lack the precision to even clearly define simple boundaries of behavior, especially when nuanced by myriad values and beliefs. This means that the method of reconciliation for conflicting logic cannot be the same as that for precisely-defined goals such as software requires.

In defense of the article, it seems that both legislation and software respond to logical analysis. It seems that clearly-defined legislation is also clearly-defined propositional logic.

OT: Some Science Fiction writer will probably have a field day describing a serious future where the computationality of Truth, Justice and Equality conflict with real life. In Houston, if you run a red light you've broken the law. A computer and camera can prove you ran the red light. However, thousands of tickets per year are being dismissed due to matters of extenuation, mitigation and mercy. So where does the "objective, computerized judicial process" fit in?

"Elected officials should be limited to two terms; one in office and one in jail."

Re:OP missed the biggest one!

[Jane Q. Public]

Sorry, but you are wrong. It is firmly established -- and has been for a long time -- that the "general welfare" phrase is SUBJECT TO the rest of the document.

Just as you might write: "We want to promote good nutrition, by going to the grocery store and doing the following:"

It is that following part that defines how the general welfare may be promoted.

This is further supported by the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions. Go ahead and look them up. They established, without any doubt, that the Federal Government has no power to do ANYTHING that is not specifically listed as one of its defined powers, despite any language about "general welfare" or "necessary and proper".

Even before that, it was thoroughly explained in the Federalist Papers (#41 is a good example) that the Federal Government did not have power to perform acts that are outside the specifically listed powers.

You can go off about "no variation of our language" and so on, but you are taking those phrases very definitely out of context. And in their original context and meaning, they DO NOT authorize the Federal Government to do things that are outside their specifically listed Constitutional powers.

You could argue with me for hours if you wanted, and I could just continue to supply you with historical documents and court decisions that show you to be wrong. But I probably wouldn't, because you would be wasting my time and everyone else's. You can look this stuff up yourself, guy. Get a little real education about it, rather than making assumptions about what somebody was saying 200+ years ago. The actual meanings of their words are a matter of record, and prove you wrong.

The minimum wage is set for certain companies via the "commerce clause" justification, which is not just arguably false but some states have already passed resolutions stating that they will not longer enforce it at the Federal Government's whim. Take a look at state marijuana laws as well... the Federal Government has tried to regulate marijuana and other drugs under the "commerce clause" umbrella, but certain states have balked and said "no more". And the Fed can't do anything about it, because the states are right.

So, I understand the basis of your arguments. But they are incorrect. And state after state, in just the last year, have been proving that in various ways.

Seriously. Read about the 9th and 10th Amendments. Look around you and see the laws that states are passing. Not only is your view incorrect, it is outdated, and states are taking back their rights. (By the way, several states already have proposed state laws to reject a National health care plan on the very bases I have already mentioned: the Feds don't have the Constitutional authority to do so. Go ahead... tell THEM they are wrong. They will laugh at you.)

Re:Astroturfing

[Psyborgue]

It seems to me like much of the far left you like to label any movement and any critic you don't like as "astroturfing". It's really nothing more than a hollow word at this point. Do you have any evidence whatsoever he's taking money from political parties or corporations to voice his opinions?

Your Rant Online

[ysth]

What part of "News affecting your ability to live as a free, responsible person online belongs in the Your Rights Online (YRO) section. Spam, invasions of privacy, onerous licenses -- they all go here." is hard to understand?

Re:Something needs to be done as today's system is

[Hognoxious]

The more government is involved in economic decisions, the more corporations will try to insert themselves into the government to influence those economic decisions.

But the less the government is involved in economic decisions, the less corporations will feel the need to influence it. Seems you just can't win.

Re:OP missed the biggest one!

[Lehk228]

what restriction prevents it? you already asserted (without backing up) that the general welfare and interstate commerce clauses do not allow it (and yet medicaid and medicare have been around for years, and growing a plant on my balcony constitutes interstate commerce)

i think you meant to type "in my private fantasy world neither the President of Congress have Constitutional authorization to legislate health care for private individuals."

Re:Something needs to be done as today's system is

[readin]

Could an American please explain to me why the majority of USA seems to oppose public healthcare?

Consider that if the software industry in the form of IBM had been socialized in the 1970s, we would all still be using mainframes - every last one of us. It was great at the time, but it was a free market that allowed other forms of computing to show the IBM leaders that their belief in mainframes as the way of the future was wrong. When the government makes a decision, who can show that it was right or wrong? Everyone must follow it - and so any better ideas are squelched. The U.S. government might be capable of implementing with the best known solution for now, but I also want the new best solutions to be born and thrive rather than being killed in the womb by government regulation. I don't want to be stuck with the best 2009 medical system in 2030.



What is the difference between Microsoft and the Federal Government? Both occasionally do something right. Both have even been known to do something extremely well. But both also have a long history of providing crap that annoy anyone who understands what is being provided, the privacy issues, and the amount of control. Both try to extend their reach into every facet of your experience. So what is the difference?

I can choose Linux. I can choose Mac. I can choose WordPerfect. It will cost me in terms of convenience because almost everyone else uses MS Windows and MS Office standards - but I can choose to be different if I have strong enough reasons for not wanting Microsoft.

When the Federal government makes the decisions for me - I have no choice.

All political power comes from the barrel of a gun - Mao Tse Tung

Re:Something needs to be done as today's system is

[sarhjinian]

That's just simply not the case. If it were, Canadian citizens wouldn't come to the US for treatment...

Yes, it's true that rich Canadians who want to turbo the system go to the US, and that the Canadian provincial systems will occasionally pay for care in the US when they face a resource shortage.

I have a question, though: where do poor and middle-class Americans with no coverage go? Because they sure as hell can't go to Canada. From my perspective, it seems like the Canadian and European systems forces rich people with non-life-threatening conditions wait a bit longer, while the American system makes poor people either go drown in debt, wait until they're on death's doorstep, or actually die.

I think that's a pretty solid endorsement of socialized care, unless you're a well-to-do sociopath.

Re:Something needs to be done as today's system is

[HiThere]

You can watch the government giving an estimated Trillion dollars to the banks, and then say MediCare is going to bankrupt the country?

I think your priorities are a bit strange.

Re:Something needs to be done as today's system is

[MrData]

I will be blunt only be cause your post deserves it:

Both you and Paul Krugman are idiots.

1. This has absolutely NOTHING to do with race. My circle of friends have an informal rule about arguing in which you automatically loose when invoking Nazis to bolster your position. This should also apply to bringing up racism as well (P.S. Just so you know, I am not white).
2. About half of the 40-50 million uninsured your are talking about are foreign nationals, the vast majority of which are Illegals.

I will split the difference with you about your last point. I have personally had problems with a carrier which did not properly honor it's claims, but my company was able to switch to another one because we had a choice. Single payer WILL (as admitted by many democrats including Barney Frank and Mr. Obama) eventually drive out all private sector carriers.

Re:Something needs to be done as today's system is

[uninformedLuddite]

I think he defined why the US is such an awful place very well